Chapter 15 #2
“I don’t, actually.” Logan rounded the aisle with a chuckle, circling back toward the front. “And I guess with everything I’ve got going on, hanging my laundry doesn’t seem as important.”
“Everything you’ve got going on?”
“School, practice, work, homework.” Logan’s voice seemed a little heavy as he listed them off. He caught me looking, and quickly smiled. “But it’s fine. I can handle it. It just means I might have a wrinkled shirt here and there.”
“You’re booked and busy for a high schooler.” I quirked my lips to the side. “You can’t ask your mom to iron it for you?”
“Nah.” Logan shrugged, rubbing the side of his neck. “You’re pretty busy, too, I’m sure. What does a normal day for Madison Oliphant look like?”
“School, cheer practice, then whatever Jade wants to do afterward,” I said, and, again, the unsettled feeling bloomed in me again. “Lately, though, we haven’t really been doing as much.”
“She text you after last night?”
Last night, when she left me outside of Wallflower, felt like forever ago. “No,” I admitted. “She didn’t.”
For a moment, Logan didn’t reply. His shoulders lifted with a deep breath in, and then relaxed as he let it out.
“I want to be mad at her for leaving you there. I want to be furious that she’d leave you stranded without a way home, and I want to be furious that the jerk who was touching you didn’t give up his seat. ”
“But?”
“But I’m grateful,” Logan said. He paused for a beat, the two of us just regarding each other. “It meant I could be selfish again.”
And you have so many crappy people in your life, Logan had said to me once. And I just… selfishly wanted to be a good one for you.
“I was going to call you,” I confessed. “I’d—I’d been thinking about it, but I wasn’t going to be able to hold out for much longer.”
Logan gestured to the store around us with a grand sweep of his arm. “Despite how lame I am?”
As I looked at him, it was almost like I could feel something welling inside me.
When I’d first seen Logan, I’d been right about him, but I’d also been wrong.
Logan, with his golden hair and bright blue eyes.
Logan, with his wrinkled clothes, surrounded by old mint-in-the-box action figures and costumes.
He was handsome, but he was unique in a way I never could’ve expected.
Logan, too, had been right and wrong before—my mind on this place had been changed, but not because I thought it was cool. It was because Logan found it all cool.
I like that part, too, I almost said. I like all of you.
The owner of the store came back then with a small box, apologizing that it’d been hidden underneath someone else’s order. Noah had paid online, but Logan still passed him over a bill—I assumed it was for the donations he’d mentioned.
But once we were back outside, he turned to me. We shouldn’t have been standing there, in the middle of the Brentwood sidewalk where anyone could drive by and see us, but in that moment, I wasn’t thinking about this secret. I was just thinking about how wrong I was about a lot of things.
Logan lifted two closed fists. “Pick a hand,” he told me.
“Oh my God, Logan.” I wrinkled my nose. “Do not tell me you do magic tricks.”
Logan’s grin stretched wider. “Pick a hand.”
“You’re really testing me with the icks, you know that? I’m starting to think you’re doing it on purpose.”
Logan wiggled both of his fists impatiently. “Just pick a hand, Juliet.”
Even though I resisted, I looked down to his fists. There wasn’t anything really discernible about them—they were both the same size, so whatever Logan held was small. If he even held anything at all. I begrudgingly tapped his left one.
“Oof.” Logan exhaled harshly between his teeth. He turned his fist over, hesitating. “That… was a really good guess.” And then he revealed his palm.
Sitting perfectly in the middle of Logan’s hand sat the purple, fire-breathing dragon I’d admired in the store. In his palm, it looked no bigger than the size of a quarter, smaller in his grip than it’d been in mine. That’d been what he’d passed the money over for, and he now held it out to me.
“Why are you always giving me something?” My voice came out softer than I meant, almost unsteady. “The flowers from mini golf, the goose from the arcade.”
“So you have something to remember me by,” Logan replied, voice light. Our gazes locked. So you have something to remember me by, he’d said, as if a day would come where we’d no longer see each other.
My throat tightened as I brushed the pad of my finger over the dragon’s painted flames, tracing the fleck of white in its eye that looked like a wink.
I couldn’t believe Logan thought I’d ever need something to remember him.
Out of everyone in my world, Logan was the one person who felt unforgettable.
It was such a small thing, a silly trinket from a shop we’d only spent five minutes at, but it made my chest ache in a way I couldn’t explain.
No one else bothered to notice what caught my eye, let alone hold on to it and hand it back to me like it mattered.
But Logan did. He made me feel like I mattered.
As we turned back toward his car, under my breath, I murmured, “As if I’d forget.”